Historically we are all familiar with the excessive military twist given to this education of the youths born to be Kings of Prussia. The picture books are full of portraits of them--quaint little manikins dressed in officers’ uniforms--stepping from the cradle into war’s paraphernalia. The picture of the Great Fritz beating a drum at the age of three, of which the rapturous Carlyle makes so much, has its modern counterpart in the photographs of the present child Crown Prince, clad in regimentals and saluting the camera, which are in every Berlin shop window. But another element of this stern regimen, not so much kept in view, is the absolute dependence of the son upon the father, or rather the King, which is insisted upon. We know to what abnormal lengths this ran in the youth and early manhood of Frederic the Great. It did not alter much in the next reign. In 1784, when this same Frederic was seventy-two years old, a travelling French noble was his guest at a great review in Silesia. There was also present the King’s nephew and heir, who two years later was to ascend the throne as Frederic William II, and who now was in his fortieth year. Yet of this forty-year-old Prince the Frenchman writes in his diary: “The heir presumptive lodges at a brewer’s house, and in a very mean way; is not allowed to sleep from home without permission from the King.” The results in this particular instance were not of a flattering kind, and among the decaying forms of the dying eighteenth century--in an atmosphere poisoned by the accumulated putridities of that luxurious and evil epoch--even the Hohenzollern of the next generation was not a shining success. He was at least, however, much superior to the other German sovereigns of his time, and he had the unspeakable fortune, moreover, to be the husband of that Queen Louise who is enshrined as the patron saint of Prussian history. It was she who engrafted a humane spirit upon the rough drill-sergeant body of Hohenzollern education. She made her sons love her--and it seems but yesterday since the last of these sons, a tottering old man of ninety, used to go to the Charlottenburg mausoleum on the anniversary of her death, and pray and weep in solitude beside the recumbent marble effigy of the mother who had died in 1810.